


Simple Technology

by draculard



Category: Star Wars: Thrawn Series - Timothy Zahn (2017)
Genre: But it's semi-unwilling outing, Coming Out, Fake Marriage, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Undercover as Married, Unrequited Love, asexual Thrawn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:34:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21729109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: To infiltrate a culture completely obsessed with love and marriage, Thrawn and Eli must go undercover as Nixil and Jahn, a couple looking for a destination wedding. Unfortunately for them, the people of Vudus Shaa don't just take relationships at face value.They test them first.With lie detectors, naturally.
Relationships: Thrawn | Mitth'raw'nuruodo/Eli Vanto
Comments: 8
Kudos: 91





	Simple Technology

“It’s simple technology,” Faro said, her voice brisk. “The sensors sort through your physical reaction to any stimuli, physical or verbal, and translate them somewhat crudely into emotions. It’s all the rage on Vudus Shaa; cheap versions of this machine are sold as toys in novelty shops, but the people in general believe in its effectiveness so much that it’s used in all kinds of job interviews, especially for government positions.”

Eli nodded, scratching absently at one of the electrodes attached to his wrist. Beside him, in the other chair, Thrawn sat perfectly still, his eyes fixed on Faro and the small tablet in her hands — it looked almost like the obsolete datapads which Eli and all his friends had owned as children.

“Test one,” Faro said — and then cut herself off, spine stiffening as an alarm sounded over the intercom. Eli’s entire body tensed, his eyes darting around the room at all visible displays as he searched for some sort of clue as to what was going on — an attack? Some sort of obstacle on the hyperlane? A malfunction in a vital system?

But the alarm stopped just as suddenly as it had started.

“Anxiety from Commander Vanto,” said Faro with just a hint of a smirk, “and nothing from you, sir.”

Thrawn inclined his head, looking unperturbed.

“Wait,” said Eli, more annoyed than surprised, “that was part of the test?”

“Of course.” There was more than just a _hint_ of a smirk playing round Faro’s lips now. “What else could I do to test you? If I drew my blaster, would either of you really think I was attacking you? The only way I could analyze your response to surprise and danger was to actually surprise you with potential danger.”

“I got that part,” said Eli, frowning. “I just didn’t know you were such a good actor.”

Next to him, Thrawn nodded at Faro and said, “While the Commodore’s posture certainly grew rigid at the sound of the alarm, her grip on the datapad remained slack, with no sign of reflexive tension. Nor did her eyes widen. It was clear as well from the lack of echo on the alarms that they were playing only over this room’s intercom, isolated from the ship-wide system which would sound in a true emergency.”

“Right,” said Eli. “Of course.”

He suspected that if he’d taken the time to more thoroughly scrutinize Faro during the alarm, Thrawn would have gently admonished him for not looking at the displays instead. 

“I’ll set the alarm on the datapad,” Faro said, her eyes fixed to the screen. “That way, when one of you gives the wrong emotional response, we’ll all hear it — so we don’t miss anything.”

 _Great_ , Eli thought.

The alarm went off.

“Displeasure,” Faro said, smiling. She tapped the screen and the alarm went silent. “From both of you. Though mostly from you, Commander.”

Eli sneaked a glance at Thrawn, whose face was utterly unreadable as he said, “Mostly? How is the level of emotional response measured?”

Faro turned the datapad so they could see it. The screen was split into two bar graphs, one in gold and one in blue — knowing Faro’s penchant for assigning meaning to color, Eli guessed the blue graph was Thrawn’s. On the gold side, a little bar labeled ‘displeasure’ had skyrocketed halfway up the length of the graph. On Thrawn’s side, the displeasure bar was much lower, but still higher than zero.

The other bars, Eli noted, were labeled ‘pleasure,’ ‘anger,’ ‘embarrassment,’ ‘anxiety,’ and ‘arousal.’

Fantastic.

“Envy is not considered an emotion on Vudus Shaa?” Thrawn asked, his eyes still roving critically over the two graphs. “Is the concept of envy itself entirely absent, or has it been excluded from this test due to a perceived lack of importance comparative to other emotions?”

Faro and Eli exchanged a helpless look.

“On Lysatra,” said Eli, not entirely sure he was answering Thrawn’s question, “we had something sort of similar to this called aura lights. You touched your hand to a bulb and the color of the light inside changed according to your emotional state, but we didn’t have envy, either.”

Thrawn turned to him, looking entirely too interested. “Which emotions were included?” he asked.

“Er,” said Eli. He bit his lip as he tried to remember; he’d only tried the aura lights a few times at festivals and fairs. “Let’s see — amber for passion, I think, either negative or positive. Green for happiness. Blue for misery and violet — I think violet was for calm, meaning no significant emotions one way or the other.”

“Passion being a euphemism for arousal?” Thrawn checked, eyes still on the display.

Eli stammered a bit, unsure how to respond — he’d certainly never interpreted it that way, but as an adult, he couldn’t come up with a good reason why.

“I certainly wouldn’t consider it an emotion,” said Thrawn briskly. “Rather, I would classify it as a physical state; though all emotions are physical states, most cultures draw an almost indefinable line between the two, and arousal is rarely found on this side of the proverbial line. Furthermore, I find it strange that no distinction is made between ‘displeasure’ and ‘melancholy,’ though a distinction _is_ made between ‘displeasure’ and ‘anger.’ Perhaps the nuances are too subtle for the machine to interpret, but—”

Thrawn looked ready to launch a full interrogation on this subject. Luckily, Faro headed him off.

“We’d better get started on the test, sir,” she said. “From now on, I’ll stick to questions and word associations regarding your cover story. No more surprises.”

Their cover story. Eli had done his best to forget about that, but it kept rearing its ugly head. Reminders came either from his own swirling thoughts or from his crewmates — and he wasn’t sure which was worse.

The alarm on Faro’s datapad dinged.

“Anxiety,” she said with a frown. Eli’s heart sank and he opened his mouth to explain himself — but when Faro looked up, her eyes were on Thrawn. “Sir?” she prompted.

“Continue with the test, please, Commodore,” said Thrawn calmly.

Eli looked sideways at Thrawn, his mind racing. There was no trace of anxiety on Thrawn’s face; really, the only way anyone could ever know he was anxious was if they attached him to sensors, like Faro had. He wondered how many times he’d seen an anxious Thrawn without knowing it.

And then he wondered why Thrawn would ever be worried about a test like this.

And then he wondered how accurate this kriffing test was, anyway. If it was reading anxiety where there was none, there was no point in practicing in the first place. 

“Marriage,” Faro said, starting right off with the test. The alarm dinged — a different tone this time — and she shut it off quickly, nodding as she stared at the results. “Pleasure from Commander Vanto,” she read. “That’s the proper response, obviously — very good.” Somewhat awkwardly, she looked up at Thrawn, who gazed back at her without expression. “Nothing from you, sir,” she said. “It’s a total blank. Not even one bar moved.”

“I see,” said Thrawn evenly.

“We’ll try it again — this time, maybe imagine marriage to a specific person instead of marriage as a _concept_ , and we’ll see if that helps.”

She gave them both a moment to prepare and then repeated, “Marriage.”

The alarm sounded. She turned it off.

“Pleasure again from Commander Vanto,” she said with a perfunctory nod in his direction. “ _Displeasure_ from you, sir.”

“I see,” said Thrawn again. Faro hesitated, wrestling with herself, clearly unused to giving a superior officer constructive criticism. Or maybe just unused to criticizing Thrawn. 

“Make sure to imagine a marriage you would _enjoy_ , sir,” she said eventually. “I mean, there’s no point imagining a marriage to someone you don’t like.”

Thrawn inclined his head, and this time when Faro ran the test, both graphs read ‘pleasure’.

“Very good,” said Faro, and Eli suspected she was more relieved to move on than she was actually pleased with the results. “Just remember, this reads as a bar graph, so the _amount_ of emotion is on display as well, not just the name of it. Both of you need to be right up there at the top of the graph.”

She spun the datapad around to illustrate her point: while Eli’s bar was high enough to pass muster, Thrawn’s just barely met the halfway point. Eli glanced at Thrawn quickly enough to catch the brief tightening of his jaw.

Simultaneously, the alarm went off and the _pleasure_ bar disappeared, replaced with a tiny jump of the _displeasure_ bar on Thrawn’s side. And a moment after that, alarm still ringing, Thrawn’s _embarrassment_ bar edged up instead.

Faro turned the alarm off and reset the graph, hiding a smile. Thrawn caught Eli’s eye with a look of muted chagrin.

“At least we’ve confirmed its accuracy,” he said. Eli’s only response was a smile; privately, he was just glad it wasn’t _him_ getting embarrassed by the test. Yet.

The next few words went quickly — and only strengthened the pattern Eli and Thrawn had established thus far.

“Wedding,” Faro said.

Pleasure from Eli. Displeasure from Thrawn — less displeasure on the second try, small amount of pleasure on the third. 

“Commitment,” Faro said.

Pleasure from Eli, initial displeasure from Thrawn. (“Although,” he mused, “it is certainly no great task to interpret commitment in a non-romantic light.” His next try read high levels of pleasure, and Eli had a sneaking suspicion Thrawn was thinking of military service.)

“Love,” Faro said.

High levels of pleasure from Eli. Anxiety from Thrawn.

“Maybe marriage just isn’t for you, sir,” Faro said, almost apologetically. From the way her fingers swiped over the screen, Eli guessed she was looking at a report of their results so far. “If you can train yourself to associate the word ‘marriage’ with something else entirely, instead of just trying to imagine marriage to somebody you like, and do the same for other words related to it...”

“That has indeed been my strategy,” Thrawn acknowledged. “I suspect it’s a simple matter of time and practice.”

Which, after all, was why they were running this test now, a week before the undercover mission was set to start. 

“Next section,” Faro announced, logging their results with a tap of her finger. “I’m going to run through this one a lot of different ways, just in case. Ready?”

They nodded.

“Are you excited for the wedding?” Faro asked, reading the question off her datapad.

Their graphs showed unequal amounts of pleasure and roughly equal measures of anxiety. Faro examined the results doubtfully.

“The anxiety is fine, I think,” she said. “Who doesn’t get nervous about a wedding? But make sure to work on the pleasure displays.”

This comment was not explicitly aimed at either of them in particular, but Eli had seen the graphs and knew it was meant for Thrawn.

“When’s the wedding?” Faro asked, reading off the display again.

This time, they both managed high pleasure outputs. 

“Excellent,” said Faro. “See, practice makes perfect. Big plans for the honeymoon?”

The alarm went off and Faro frowned down at the screen, hesitating a fraction of a second before she muted it. “High levels of anxiety and displeasure from you, sir,” she said, eyes flickering to the Grand Admiral.

“Understood,” said Thrawn, eyebrows twitching. “Ask me again, please.”

Faro obliged, and this time Thrawn’s displeasure and anxiety levels were significantly lower, though they hadn’t yet been replaced by pleasure. It took them three tries to attain an appropriate response, and Eli could tell that Thrawn’s uncharacteristic struggle with the test was having a slight but noticeable effect on all of them. 

Or at least, on him and Faro. Thrawn was taking the setback well, with no sign of frustration on his face or in his demeanor. He worked through the questions patiently and calmly until he had delivered the correct response. 

The thoroughness with which he attacked each question was a good thing, Eli told himself. The citizens of Vudus Shaa simply did not trust anyone without a romantic partner, and the culture of the world demanded loyalty and passion in each relationship. While a same-sex interspecies couple would not stand out in their society like it would on Coruscant, a single, unattached person — or worse, an unhappy, disloyal couple — would. 

As such, any single person who attempted to infiltrate Vudus Shaa had no hope of succeeding; any pair of officers working together undercover could only succeed if they successfully faked romantic love.

So it was good Thrawn was working so hard to fake it.

The issue was that Eli didn’t have to.

“Give me answers to the next few questions, okay?” Faro said. “It’s good practice. Commander, how did you two meet?”

“Hiking on Doukid III,” said Eli promptly. Faro nodded and turned to Thrawn.

“Sir? How did you two meet?”

“We met by chance at the trailhead,” said Thrawn smoothly and with nauseatingly perfect acting. “Both of us were hiking alone, and I suggested we walk together.”

“Perfect,” said Faro. “Pleasure from both of you on the first try. Next question: How long have you known each other?”

“Five years,” they answered simultaneously, and this time both results were perfect again. 

“How long have you been dating?”

Smiling, Eli opened his mouth to answer.

The alarm buzzed.

“Sir,” said Faro, turning the display so they could see the displeasure bar on Thrawn’s side of the graph. “Let’s try it again.”

It was a long time before Thrawn could muster up even a bit of pleasure in response to this question, let alone the high bar required to fool the people of Vudus Shaa. When he finally had it down pat, both Faro and Eli’s mouths were twitching, and it was almost impossible not to frown.

“Okay,” Faro said, hiding her weariness well. “Let’s go back to word associations real quick.”

She removed one of two plugs from the datapad — the one connected to Thrawn’s sensors — and shifted her stance ever-so-slightly, so that she was facing Eli instead of both of them.

“Betrothed,” she said. 

The word was already perfectly connected to Thrawn’s image in Eli’s mind. Faro noted the response and turned the datapad around to face Eli, tilting it slightly so Thrawn couldn’t see.

“Perfect response,” she said briskly.

Eli eyed the bar graph — pleasure and arousal — and tried not to blush. His embarrassment bar was kicking up a few notches when Faro turned the display back around.

“Lifemate,” she said. Again, Eli pictured Thrawn, and the results were perfect. Faro didn’t bother to show him. “Nixil,” she said.

This was Thrawn’s cover name, and it, too, was already perfectly linked with Thrawn in Eli’s mind. His results this time were no different. Faro silently unplugged Eli’s sensors and plugged Thrawn’s back in, turning to face him.

“Betrothed,” she said.

And of course, the alarms went off. Faro turned them off automatically, her face showing all the frustration that was absent from Thrawn’s.

“Not a good showing, sir,” she said apologetically. “Try to emulate Commander Vanto’s response: pleasure and arousal only.”

Eli tried not to scowl, suddenly very glad he wasn’t hooked up to the datapad anymore. Thrawn, damn him, was studying Eli thoughtfully at this revelation.

“Surely only a pleasure response is required,” he said. Faro shook her head immediately and emphatically.

“Maybe you could get away from that somewhere else, sir,” she said, “but not on Vudus Shaa. Passion is key there, remember? If you can’t fake that response thinking about Commander Vanto—” Eli tried not to show how much it hurt to hear that. “—try to connect his cover name and words like ‘betrothed’ and ‘lifemate’ with someone you _do_ find attractive.”

Thrawn said nothing. Though he hadn’t been asked a question, alarms on the datapad beeped for just a second before Faro turned them off, her finger still on the mute button from earlier. She frowned down at the screen.

“My apologies,” said Thrawn, and Eli got the peculiar impression that Thrawn was speaking now only to head Faro off before she could read the results. “Reset the display, Commodore. I shall try again.”

Faro obeyed, but Eli imagined there may have been a hint of hesitation as she did so. “Betrothed,” she said.

She turned the alarms off before Eli even had time to register them. Instead of addressing the results this time, she just erased them and moved on to the next test. “Lifemate,” she said.

Alarms again.

“Jahn,” she said, using Eli’s cover name.

This time there were no alarms. Faro made a valiant attempt to hide her surprise, but her finger, twitching automatically over the mute button, gave her away. When she looked up at Thrawn, her smile was small but genuine.

“Very good, sir,” she said. “Pleasure’s high — but arousal’s still at zero. May I ask who you’re picturing, sir?”

Thrawn’s eyes flickered in Eli’s direction and Eli flushed deeply, his heart jumping up only to sink again as he remembered those awful words, _arousal’s still at zero._ “Commander Vanto,” Thrawn said.

“Well,” said Faro, shuffling her feet, “have you tried picturing someone you’re attracted to? A Chiss woman, maybe?”

Thrawn’s placid expression twitched. “I doubt that would affect the results,” he said.

It took Eli and Faro a moment to process the implication of this. When they did, Eli blushed again and Faro buried her nose in the display, both of them inordinately embarrassed. Same-sex relationships were so common down on Vudus Shaa that nobody would bat an eye when faced with them, and they’d even been common on other planets, including Lysatra and Coruscant, less than a hundred years ago. But on planets enmeshed in Imperial culture, it was an almost taboo subject, the sort of thing few people talked about openly.

“A Chiss man, then,” Faro offered when she’d recovered her voice. “Someone you find good-looking.”

The alarm on the datapad went off again and Faro muted it, eyebrows furrowed. She glanced up — not at Thrawn but at Eli, thought it was certainly Thrawn’s results which had set off the alarms. She silently searched Eli’s face, no doubt checking if he understood Thrawn anymore than she did. 

The only bar shown on the display at the moment was labeled _embarrassment_ , and it was so tall it reached the top of the graph.

“Again,” said Thrawn calmly, without a hint of emotion in his voice, “I doubt that would affect the results.”

Eli could tell Faro was flummoxed and still trying to catch his eye; he looked at Thrawn instead, his own eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “You’ve been able to pass all the questions before with a little practice, sir,” he said, hiding his hurt with a tone of encouragement. 

“It is not a question of practice, I’m afraid,” said Thrawn. Now that Eli was looking at him more closely, he could see signs of embarrassment in Thrawn’s posture — the stiffness of his spine, the slight purple tinge to his cheeks. All signs he would have missed if it weren’t for Faro’s datapad and its snitching bar graph. “I cannot accurately reproduce an emotion I have not experienced.”

Silence filled the room like an oppressive chemical sucking oxygen out of the atmosphere. Faro half-smiled, then seemed to realize Thrawn wasn’t joking and quickly wiped the smile away. 

“You may recall,” said Thrawn, his voice still quiet and toneless, “I recommended we select a different cover story, if possible.”

He had indeed recommended that — and it had been Eli who talked him out of it, pretending to find the idea of a false marriage just as undignified and distasteful as Thrawn did even as he argued in its defense. But when Eli removed his own less-than-honorable motivations for their cover story, he still couldn’t think of any other method that would work. The people of Vudus Shaa simply wouldn’t trust anyone who wasn’t married or in love — not enough to allow complete infiltration into their political groups.

“Chiss don’t feel arousal?” Eli asked finally, the disbelief clear in his voice. His mind whirred as he tried to figure out how this worked, from an evolutionary standpoint. “At all?”

Thrawn shifted in his seat. The display on the datapad, already wiped clean by Faro, showed high levels of embarrassment again. “An understandable conclusion,” Thrawn said, “but an incorrect one. Chiss, like humans, are mammals and would not survive as a species without reproductive instincts such as arousal.” He was silent a moment, and when he finally spoke again, his jaw was tight. “In any population, however, there must be a small number of individual anomalies.”

Silently, Faro unplugged Thrawn’s sensors from the datapad and turned off the display, keeping her eyes downcast. Her mortification was clear — and Eli could sympathize, though he hoped he was hiding his own a bit better than she was.

Not to mention the dark inward spiral his heart was going through. 

“You’ve never been attracted to _anyone_?” he asked, his voice sounding hollow to his own ears. 

Thrawn glanced at him, making brief, cold eye contact before averting his gaze. “No,” he said.

It was a long moment before either Eli or Faro found their voices.

“Lots of people are like that,” said Faro doubtfully. “Especially — well — intellectual or ambitious types, they just don’t have time for stuff like that. So I’ve heard.”

Eli had heard similar things — though Faro was kindly presenting it as a well-known, serious phenomenon, while all Eli had ever heard were envious and mean-spirited jokes, none of which ever had any basis in truth. The truth was, he’d never heard of _anyone_ who didn’t feel arousal at least occasionally. 

“You’ve…” said Faro, her voice faltering. “You’ve been in relationships before, though. Right, sir?”

Thrawn’s voice, when he answered, was heavy. “When I say I cannot accurately reproduce an emotion I have never experienced, I do not make this claim from baseless assumptions. I am well-versed in my own shortcomings, as every warrior must be.”

Eli thought back, remembering the words and questions Thrawn had struggled with — all of them based around romance, while non-romantic prompts, such as Eli’s cover name, or questions which could easily be applied to his and Thrawn’s real lives, had proved no difficult task at all. He found it difficult not to stare at Thrawn now, at the increasingly-obvious signs of stifled embarrassment and—

And what? Pain?

With the sensors no longer connected, it was impossible to tell.

“We’ll just have to send someone else,” said Eli firmly. “It’s best you stay onboard anyway, sir — you’ve got a more distinctive appearance than anyone else. You could be recognized.”

He was more than aware of the hypocrisy in his words; this was the same argument Thrawn had used when they first came up with the fake-marriage plan. He’d been the one who convinced Thrawn _only_ he was suitable for the job, claiming no one else had any hope of extracting all necessary information from the Vudus Shaa. Faro, privy to this fact, eyed Eli with an unpleasant combination of amusement and rebuke; Thrawn was kind enough (or distracted enough) not to acknowledge it.

“Very well,” he said, voice clipped. He removed the electrodes from his skin quickly, his expressionless face turned away from Eli and Faro. Belatedly, Eli removed his own electrodes as well. 

They were out in the passageway in less than a minute, the gear packed up and set aside, an air of embarrassment clinging relentlessly to each of them. Eli and Faro did their best to hide the whirlwind of confusion and sympathy each were going through; Thrawn seemed already recovered, striding purposefully back to the bridge with his back straight and his head held high, as though nothing of note had happened in the testing room. 

“Kriff,” Faro muttered when Thrawn was out of earshot, “that’s depressing.”

Eli agreed. He agreed to such an extent that his throat was tight and his eyes were stinging, and he couldn’t say a word.

* * *

Eli could cope with the fact that his feelings would never be reciprocated. He’d never really thought he had a chance anyway — the most he could _reasonably_ hope for from Thrawn was friendship, and he believed he had that. 

What he couldn’t cope with was that emotion he’d seen on Thrawn’s face right before they’d ended the test. That memory ate at him, wiggling into his thoughts whenever he was trying to concentrate on something else, until he’d thought about it so much he could no longer be sure whether he remembered Thrawn’s expression correctly or not. Surely by now he’d been over it so many times that the static image in his head must have gradually warped to meet his expectations.

Still, he was sure he’d seen a flicker of pain there before Thrawn walked away. 

They didn’t discuss it, of course. Two crewmembers were selected to take Thrawn and Eli’s places in the infiltration plan; they passed their tests without a hitch and were dispatched planet-side within a week. Already, they were steadily feeding information back to the Chimaera.

So there was no loss, Eli told himself. 

He was doing his best not to think about the loss. 

Outwardly — and this was a good thing — his working relationship with Thrawn seemed not to have changed (it was impossible to tell whether their non-working relationship had changed, but that was primarily because Eli had never been certain what, exactly, that relationship was). The first few days, Eli had found himself searching Thrawn’s face, quite unwillingly, for traces of emotion which simply weren’t there. 

The urge to search for more faded quickly. Now, it was entirely gone; he could work alongside Thrawn for hours without the rushes of embarrassment and anxiety (and, he might admit to himself late at night, despair) which had initially plagued him. In fact, a week after the incident, they both seemed to be back at baseline.

Studying his datapad with Thrawn at his side, their shoulders close but not touching, Eli couldn’t help feeling like a crucial piece had fallen out of a completed, beautiful jigsaw puzzle. Like something had changed, nonetheless.


End file.
